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Assessments, understood as tools for tracking what and how well
students have learned, play a critical role in the classroom.
Developing Assessments for the Next Generation Science Standards
develops an approach to science assessment to meet the vision of
science education for the future as it has been elaborated in A
Framework for K-12 Science Education (Framework) and Next
Generation Science Standards (NGSS). These documents are brand new
and the changes they call for are barely under way, but the new
assessments will be needed as soon as states and districts begin
the process of implementing the NGSS and changing their approach to
science education. The new Framework and the NGSS are designed to
guide educators in significantly altering the way K-12 science is
taught. The Framework is aimed at making science education more
closely resemble the way scientists actually work and think, and
making instruction reflect research on learning that demonstrates
the importance of building coherent understandings over time. It
structures science education around three dimensions - the
practices through which scientists and engineers do their work, the
key crosscutting concepts that cut across disciplines, and the core
ideas of the disciplines - and argues that they should be
interwoven in every aspect of science education, building in
sophistication as students progress through grades K-12. Developing
Assessments for the Next Generation Science Standards recommends
strategies for developing assessments that yield valid measures of
student proficiency in science as described in the new Framework.
This report reviews recent and current work in science assessment
to determine which aspects of the Framework's vision can be
assessed with available techniques and what additional research and
development will be needed to support an assessment system that
fully meets that vision. The report offers a systems approach to
science assessment, in which a range of assessment strategies are
designed to answer different kinds of questions with appropriate
degrees of specificity and provide results that complement one
another. Developing Assessments for the Next Generation Science
Standards makes the case that a science assessment system that
meets the Framework's vision should consist of assessments designed
to support classroom instruction, assessments designed to monitor
science learning on a broader scale, and indicators designed to
track opportunity to learn. New standards for science education
make clear that new modes of assessment designed to measure the
integrated learning they promote are essential. The recommendations
of this report will be key to making sure that the dramatic changes
in curriculum and instruction signaled by Framework and the NGSS
reduce inequities in science education and raise the level of
science education for all students.
New research in psychology, neuroscience, cognitive science, and
other fields is published every day, but the gap between what is
known and the capacity to act on that knowledge has never been
larger. Scholars and nonscholars alike face the problem of how to
organize knowledge and to integrate new observations with what is
already known. Ontologies - formal, explicit specifications of the
meaning of the concepts and entities that scientists study -
provide a way to address these and other challenges, and thus to
accelerate progress in behavioral research and its application.
Ontologies help researchers precisely define behavioral phenomena
and how they relate to each other and reliably classify them. They
help researchers identify the inconsistent use of definitions,
labels, and measures and provide the basis for sharing knowledge
across diverse approaches and methodologies. Although ontologies
are an ancient idea, modern researchers rely on them to codify
research terms and findings in computer-readable formats and work
with large datasets and computer-based analytic techniques.
Ontologies in the Behavioral Sciences: Accelerating Research and
the Spread of Knowledge describes how ontologies support science
and its application to real-world problems. This report details how
ontologies function, how they can be engineered to better support
the behavioral sciences, and the resources needed to sustain their
development and use to help ensure the maximum benefit from
investment in behavioral science research. Table of Contents Front
Matter Summary 1 Introduction 2 Why Ontologies Matter 3
Understanding Ontologies 4 How Ontologies Facilitate Science 5
Engineering Behavioral Ontologies 6 Conclusions and Recommendations
Appendix A: Ontological Systems Referenced in the Report Appendix
B: Example Use Cases Generated in a Committee Self-Survey Appendix
C: Biographical Sketches of Committee on Accelerating Behavioral
Science through Ontology Development and Use
The Committee on Educational Excellence and Testing Equity was
created under the auspices of the National Research Council (NRC),
and specifically under the oversight of the Board on Testing and
Assessment (BOTA). The committee's charge is to explore the
challenges that face U.S. schools as they work to achieve the
related goals of academic excellence and equity for all students.
This report provides not only the summary of a workshop held by the
forum on the testing of English-language learners (students
learning English as an additional language) in U.S. schools, but
also a report on the committee's conclusions derived from that
workshop and from subsequent deliberations.
The forested land in the United States is an asset that is owned
and managed not only by federal, state, and local governments, but
also by families and other private groups, including timber
investment management organizations and real estate investment
trusts. The more than 10 million family forestland owners manage
the largest percentage of forestland acreage (35 percent) and the
majority of the privately owned forestland (62 percent). The Forest
Service of the United States Department of Agriculture, which is
responsible for the stewardship of all of the nation's forests, has
long worked with private owners of forestland on forest management
and preservation. At a time when all forestland is facing
intensified threats because of the long-term effects of global
climate change, the Forest Service recognizes that family
forestland owners play a key role in protecting forestland. It is
working to identify optimal ways to engage this diverse group and
support them in mitigating threats to the biologically diverse land
they own or manage. Climate Change Education: Engaging Family
Private Forest Owners on Issues Related to Climate Change is the
summary of a workshop, convened by the National Research Council's
Board on Science Education and Board on Environmental Change and
Society as part of its Climate Change Education Roundtable series,
to explore approaches to the challenges that face state foresters,
extension agents, private forestry consultants, and others involved
with private family forestland owners on how to take climate change
into consideration when making decisions about their forests. The
workshop focused on how findings from the behavioral, social, and
educational sciences can be used to help prepare for the impacts of
climate change. The workshop participants discussed the threats to
forests posed by climate change and human actions; private
forestland owners' values, knowledge, and dispositions about forest
management, climate change, and related threats; and strategies for
improving communication between forestland owners and service
providers about forest management in the face of climate change.
The National Science Foundation developed the Science of Science
and Innovation Policy program (SciSIP) in 2006 to fund basic and
applied research that bears on and can help guide public- and
private-sector policy making for science and innovation. By design,
SciSIP has engaged researchers from many domains in the development
of a community of practice who work together to continually develop
frameworks, tools, and datasets for implementing science and
innovation policy. Since its inception, the SciSIP program has
funded more than 150 researchers and their graduate students. The
program also contributed to the initiation of the STAR METRICS
(Science and Technology for America's Reinvestment: Measuring the
Effect of Research on Innovation, Competitiveness and Science)
program, a collaborative effort between the National Science
Foundation and the National Institutes of Health. The STAR METRICS
program develops tools and mechanisms for measuring federal
expenditures on scientific activities, with particular focus on
quantifying productivity and employment outcomes.
"Science of Science and Innovation Policy" summarizes a public
conference convened by the Committee on National Statistics of the
National Academy of Sciences/National Research Council to present
research funded by SciSIP and foster intellectual exchange among
funded researchers, science, technology, and innovation policy
practitioners, and other members of the science community. The
conference highlighted advances in the emerging field of the
science of science and innovation policy, in particular, models,
frameworks, tools, and datasets comprising the evidentiary basis
for science and innovation policy. This report focuses on return on
investment models; organizational structures that foster
accelerated scientific productivity; linkages between
commercialized scientific knowledge and job creation; the roles of
universities and government in technology transfer and innovation;
technology diffusion and economic growth; non-economic impacts of
science and innovation expenditures; regional and global networks
of knowledge generation and innovation; mechanisms for encouraging
creativity and measuring outputs and outcomes from transformative
research; and development, manipulation and visualization of data
representing scientific activities.
Now that the initial results of The Third International Mathematics
and Science Study (TIMSS) have been released, the Board on
International Comparative Studies in Education (BICSE) has turned
its attention to what happens next. The TIMSS data are potentially
useful to researchers, policy makers, practitioners, and others
interested in evidence regarding factors that influence student
learning. But although the study has produced a remarkable volume
of intriguing data, it is by no means complete. Scholarly review of
the initial data, evaluations of claims based on the data, and
follow-up secondary analysis based on the primary findings are all
integral parts of a study of this magnitude, but the bulk of this
very important work has not yet begun. Because of the board's
serious concern that this necessary work has not been undertaken,
or funded, it held a workshop on June 17 and 18, 1998, to explore
different perspectives on possible next steps. The workshop was an
invaluable opportunity for the board to explore issues and
questions it has addressed over the years and to solidify its
thinking about many of them. Because the board is convinced of the
importance of moving forward with the TIMSS data, it presents in
this report both recommendations as to what ought to be done and
many of the innovative specific ideas that emerged from the
workshop. These recommendations reflect the board's conviction,
based on its many years of involvement with and deliberations about
TIMSS, that this study is an extremely rich resource for the
policy, scholarly, and practice communities, and that all of these
groups have a responsibility to take full advantage of it. The
recommendations and discussion in this report are intended to
assist both researchers and funders who are considering further
work with TIMSS, and a broader audience of researchers, policy
makers, practitioners, and others who have followed the TIMSS
results and are eager to use them. This report is, in a sense, the
culmination of many years of effort for the board.
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